


She's No Kitten

by rabbit_hearted



Category: The Boys (TV 2019)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:27:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27092041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbit_hearted/pseuds/rabbit_hearted
Summary: And she knew that they were tethered at the heart line, the two of them. When she turned to meet his gaze, the pain in his own expression was as familiar as a fingerprint.
Relationships: The Female | Kimiko Miyashiro/The Frenchman
Comments: 18
Kudos: 95





	She's No Kitten

**Author's Note:**

> Hi!
> 
> I wanted to write a version of the church scene where Frenchie understands what Kimiko is saying, so I imagined a scenario where she falls in with the Albanian mafia roughly a year after the events of Season 2. I also needed to write a time-lapse fic for the express purpose of giving Frenchie long hair based on [this photo](https://www.reddit.com/r/LadyBoners/comments/cu29ss/tomer_kapon/) of Tomer Kapon that I saw about a week ago and haven't stopped thinking about since.

Baby, you're a vampire

You want blood and I promised

I'm a bad liar

With a savior complex

-Phoebe Bridgers, _Savior Complex_

* * *

It didn’t take much to sweeten Kimiko to the concept. A sellout always recognizes another sellout, and, all things considered, Kimiko had sold out quickly. 

It had actually pissed Cherie off a little, given that she’d prepared a whole sales pitch. They sat across from one another on plastic folding chairs, Cherie blowing fat plumes of smoke through her teeth and thumbing through envelopes bloated with more bills than Kimiko had ever seen in her life. 

“It’s easy money, you know? Knock out a couple of old fuckers here and there.” Cherie’s glassy gaze swung back and forth between Kimiko and the cash like a cold pendulum, smarting against her skin in the places it touched. “We split it ninety, ten.” 

Kimiko grabbed a piece of notebook paper and uncapped a Sharpie between her teeth, and then she wrote two wobbly letters, slanted down, as though compelled by gravity, because she hadn’t figured how to write straight yet. 

**OK.**

“Okay, as in …” Cherie placed her chin in her palm, watching Kimiko placidly. “You’ll do it? You’ll take the job?” 

Kimiko nodded.

“Damn.” Cherie whistled slowly through her teeth, and when she turned her face up toward the fluorescent lamp, her irises shone through as clear as cut glass. “Frenchie is going to fucking kill me.” 

The first time Kimiko smokes weed is in the back of a utility van, sandwiched between Cherie and a paunchy, unsmiling Albanian who smells of stale cigarettes and body odor. Cherie is puffing idly on a blunt and yelling at someone on the phone, and after she hangs up, she holds it out to Kimiko, one brow cocked into her hairline. 

“Might help take the edge off,” she says. Absently, Kimiko wonders if the “edge” Cherie refers to is supposed to be the genocide of her village or the murder of her brother, or perhaps some combination of the two, but ultimately, she supposes it’s all semantics. 

Kimiko plucks the blunt from her outstretched hand and takes a long drag, glancing at Cherie, as though for confirmation that she’s doing it right. When Cherie nods, she takes another, deeper inhale, wincing as it burns the inside of her throat. 

The Albanian holds his hand out meaningfully, but Cherie sucks her teeth and snatches it back from Kimiko. “Get your own.” 

“Sharing is caring,” he leers in accented English.

Cherie smirks, hitching her thumb at Kimiko. “She’s a Supe. The odds aren’t on your side, _budalla._ ”

He glances back at Kimiko, frowning. His round face looks a little paler in the light of the moon that slips through the tinted window. 

Kimiko doesn’t know any of their names, though it doesn’t seem to matter anyway. When there’s a job, Cherie always finds her, appearing like a shadow on the sidewalk. Their dynamic is too transactional to be considered friendship, but Cherie supplies steady income, and that’s enough for Kimiko at the end of the day.

After an indeterminate amount of time driving, the van idles next to a curb outside of a 24-hour laundromat. The directive from the driver arrives without preamble.

“Get out.” 

“There’s our cue,” Cherie mumbles, kicking open the back door with her foot. She hops out and waits for Kimiko to follow suit, her half-smoked blunt still smoldering wispy trails into the night. 

By now, Kimiko has begun to feel pleasantly numb, as though moving through water. She jumps onto the curb and blinks dazedly in the buzzing neon halo of the laundromat sign, watching the van disappear down the street in a plume of exhaust. 

“They’re not much for formalities, but they pay well.” Cherie snuffs out the blunt with the toe of her boot. “I’ll meet you at the same place tomorrow with the cash.”

Kimiko nods.

“You did well tonight,” Cherie says, watching Kimiko with an inscrutable look. When Kimiko doesn’t react, Cherie glances around awkwardly, shifting her weight between her feet. “Alright, then. You want me to walk you back to your place?”

She shakes her head. 

Cherie sighs. “You look kind of …” she squints, frowning. “Pale. You sure you’re alright?”

Kimiko shrugs, turning away. She’s not sure where the Albanians dropped them, but judging by the sudden influx of trendy artisan sandwich shops and breweries, she’s fairly certain she’s in the general vicinity of Bed-Stuy. She’s suddenly ravenously hungry and wonders if it's an effect of the weed. 

She walks for the next twenty minutes, turning down side streets and deserted alleyways until the gentrified scenery steadily melts into bodegas, liquor stores, dingy Dollar Trees with boarded-up windows. Before returning to the apartment, she stops at a deli and picks up a greasy meatball sub, being that they are, after all, one of the only things America is actually good for. 

It’s uncharacteristically quiet when she makes it back home. Evenings usually find Frenchie blaring rap music and puttering around in the kitchen, or methodically disassembling household objects just to reassemble them again, or watching reruns of _The Golden Girls._

They’ve spent the past year carving out a tiny, if not vaguely mildewed corner of the world, a cheap two bedroom with splotchy water stains and creaky floorboards. But there’s music, and conversation, and, occasionally, homemade pastries, when he’s particularly missing his _maman_. And it’s closer to a home than Kimiko has ever had before. 

Kimiko squints at the wall clock and realizes that hours have passed in her absence.

“Where were you?”

She finds him watching her with his hip cocked against the wall, his dark gaze narrowed accusingly onto her own. “It’s almost four in the morning.”

Kimiko realized some months ago that Frenchie is, for all intents and purposes, objectively handsome. She didn’t arrive at the conclusion all at once, but rather, in phases: Him smiling impishly in a flour-stained bandana, buying her nail polish, twirling her in a darkened room. One night, she watched as his deft fingers worked to repair their faulty kitchen cabinet and she wondered how they’d feel against her skin, and that was the beginning of the end of it all. 

Kimiko kicks off her boots and sets her sub on the armrest of the couch. _“Nowhere,_ ” she signs. 

“What is that supposed to mean-”

 _“Why do I have to explain? You’re not my boyfriend.”_ She drops onto the couch and reclines, crossing her feet at the ankles. Sure enough, when she turns the TV on, it’s already set to their usual channel. She’s watched enough of _Golden Girls_ with Frenchie to understand the general premise, though some of the American references still evade her. 

Frenchie sighs, kneading the bridge of his nose between his forefinger and thumb. “No, I’m not.” He drops into the seat next to her. “I just wish you’d tell me before you disappear.” 

Kimiko glances at him, his jaw taut in the bluish reflection of the television. She tears off half of the sandwich and offers it to him, and they spend the next few minutes eating and watching the episode in pointed silence.

Which very nearly works, except that every few minutes, Frenchie will glance at her out of the corner of his eye, his mouth pinched in an expression she’s come to recognize as disapproval. Eventually, Kimiko grows so tired of it that she whirls on him, scowling.

_“Just say it.”_

His dark eyes scroll over her face. “Can you at least tell me why you smell like weed?” 

Kimiko shrugs. “ _I_ _smoked.”_

“Why?”

_“Because I wanted to.”_

“But _why, mon coeur-_ ”

 _“Because,”_ she signs, springing to her feet. _“What else do I have?”_ Kimiko tosses her palms up, gesturing to the dark living room.

Something like hurt flickers across Frenchie’s features, and then it’s passed, whisked into the undertow of an impassive blink. Slowly, he rises to his feet and faces her, that sulky mouth folded into a frown. “You have me,” he mutters. And then he’s gone, pulling the door shut behind him, leaving Kimiko to _The Golden Girls_ and her own pounding heartbeat. 

  
  
  


It’s impossible to forget that they very nearly kissed, once.

They were tucked away in a dingy basement, awash in the glow of the staticky television broadcast. The newscaster had very straight, white teeth, and Kimiko focused on them with rapt attention as she systematically tore her world apart.

She recalls the warm wash of his breath over her mouth when he whispered, “Look at me.” She recalls the way he looked bright enough to burn, half-wild with desperation. She recalls that lips had parted just enough to make room for hers to slot between them. 

And she knew that they were tethered at the heart line, the two of them. When she turned to meet his gaze, the pain in his own expression was as familiar as a fingerprint. 

She recalls all of it. Though, some days, the memory doesn’t even feel like hers to keep. 

  
  
  


Days pass inconsequentially.

Kimiko takes even more jobs from Cherie, if only for an excuse to avoid the apartment. When she does go home, it’s so late it’s nearly early, all long shadows and dusky, filtered light. He doesn’t wait up for her anymore, and it feels like a sort of resignation that she deserves, even if it worries a pit in the center of her stomach. 

She should have known, then, that it would all come to a head eventually. 

“What the _fuck_ is going on here?”

Kimiko stares straight ahead, the way Cherie taught her to. Her gaze tracks patterns in the wood grain of the massive crucifix over the altar, and she finds herself thinking about creationism, the supposed design behind everything withering to dust. 

“You have her doing _hits-_ ”

“I told you,” Cherie murmurs, deceptively soft. “She’s no kitten.”

When Kimiko turns to Frenchie, his face is taut with fury. He crouches in front of the pew, trembling with restraint. “Why?”

Kimiko pulls her lip between her teeth and then leans back slowly. “ _You weren’t supposed to come here.”_

“I know you blame yourself for your brother, but _this_ ,” Frenchie hisses, gesturing between them. “This is not the way.” He swallows, and she tracks the twitching path of his Adam’s apple. “This is poison for your soul. I know it is.” 

His hair has grown longer and now hangs in mousy waves around his face, rendering him somewhat boyish. She has the inexplicable urge, just then, to run her hands through it. If they were different people, perhaps she would trace her fingertips over his jaw in the places where the painted light touches it. “Come with me, _mon coeur.”_

There’s something in his raspy plea that douses cold water over her awareness. Kimiko springs to her feet and pushes the heels of her palms against his chest, and he skids over the marble tiles and falls against the back of the adjoining pew. For a moment, they face one another in silence, a Renaissance tableau of reckless want. 

“ _I_ _got my baby brother killed,”_ Kimiko signs. 

“Kimiko,” he says, pushing himself to his feet. “You did _not-_ ”

She feels like something out of control, then, a tropical storm spinning towards the coastline. Pain thrums through her chest like a dull toothache, and when she can’t stand to look at Frenchie, her eyes fall on the looming statue of Jesus. _“Kenji was the only thing that mattered to me.”_

“And you think _this_ is what he wanted for you?” Frenchie spits. “You think _this_ is retribution?” 

In her periphery, she can feel Cherie watching them mildly, her attention sliding from Frenchie, then Kimiko, then back again. 

Kimiko pivots to face him, her chest heaving. A single tear trails a warm track down the curve of her cheek. _“Stop trying to help me.”_

“Why do you keep doing this?” His narrowed gaze roves fleetingly over her. “I thought we were… _Je ne sais pas,_ ” he mumbles. “I thought we were _friends_.”

She nearly reaches for him and then retracts, as though scalded. _“I don’t deserve it.”_

“What is _it_?” Frenchie huffs a humorless laugh. “What is this, mon coeur?” 

Kimiko blinks up at the ceiling, if only because it’s easier to settle her attention on the twirling dust motes than the second person in the world who had ever bothered to understand her. _“Anything with you.”_

Frenchie opens his mouth and then snaps it shut. Perhaps there’s nothing left to say that they haven’t already. 

He turns on his heel and leaves.

  
  
  


When he returns home, hours later, the living room has been converted into a makeshift pillow fort. He finds her lying flat on her back, staring unseeingly at the patterns the light casts through the gaps in the bedsheets. 

_“I’m sorry.”_

He crawls through the entrance and sits cross-legged next to her, flanked by a pair of red couch cushions. “I know.”

Kimiko’s eyes drift shut. The proximity of him is something cosmic, overwhelming, too bright to face head-on. “ _I told her I’m done with it.”_

Frenchie sighs, bowing his head into his upturned palms. He’s so quiet that she’s desperate to know what he’s thinking.

“I hate that she even _mentioned_ the idea to you-”

 _“She was right, though,”_ Kimiko interjects. _“I can make my own choices. It’s not her fault.”_

“And it’s not yours,” he replies. “None of this is, Kimiko.”

Kimiko tips her chin up and pops one eye open, appraising him with faint, unsmiling amusement. _“It’s not like I can get hurt-”_

“That doesn’t matter. Not to me.” 

He’s so close, his neck craned down towards her, her head nearly in his lap. Her fingers twitch restlessly as she imagines pulling the collar of his shirt and closing the distance. _“You worry too much.”_

“The idea of you living that life, killing for money? I hate that for you _mon coeur_. So much, it makes me crazy.”

Kimiko sits up and positions herself across from him, close enough that their kneecaps touch. She reaches for his hand and flips it up, tracing her pinkie along the divots and scuffs along the flesh of his palm. _“I know.”_

When she looks at him again, his lips are half-parted, just enough for hers to slot between them. She lifts his knuckle to her mouth and presses her lips against it.

“Kimiko,” he says. His fingertips find her battering pulse point against the column of her neck, and she leans into his warmth, sighing. “I want to do this right this time.”

She blinks dazedly as his hands drift over her cheeks, cupping her face in his palms. _“What?”_

“Kiss you,” he says. “But only if you-”

 _“Yes,”_ she signs. A little bemused smirk twists at the edges of her lips. _“I won’t hit you this time.”_

Frenchie snorts, bending his neck so that his forehead rests against hers. “I-”

The chime of the doorbell sends them scrambling back like teenagers caught kissing in the schoolyard. Frenchie presses his fingertip to his lip, as though holding the fragile moment in place, and then curses under his breath. _“Merde.”_

Kimiko laughs and pushes herself up with her palms. When she sees Frenchie’s thunderous expression, she laughs even harder.

“And what are you laughing about, _mon coeur?”_

She scrunches her face up exaggeratedly. 

“Little minx,” he chides, not unkindly. When the doorbell rings again, Frenchie wrenches the door open with enough force that it nearly ricochets against the opposite wall. 

Hughie stands in the hallway, illuminated in a sphere of flickering fluorescent light. He holds in one hand a takeout bag, in the other a VHS tape and player. 

He blinks, nonplussed. “Hey. I thought I’d stop by.” His gaze drifts over Frenchie’s shoulder, to the pillow fort in the living room. “Am I interrupting?” 

“ _Nom de dieu_ _,”_ Frenchie mutters.

And so they eat cartons of noodles and watch the old slasher film Hughie had brought over, which Kimiko finds endearing, being that no one else she knows owns VHS tapes anymore. She’s grown fond of his eccentricities, like his insistence on “maintaining the integrity of the film-viewing experience.” 

_“I like him,”_ Kimiko signs after he leaves. _“Such a little nerd.”_

“He’s a good kid.”

They lapse into silence as they put the leftovers away, and when his elbow brushes hers, the contact trails white-hot sparks up the curve of her arm. One near-kiss is unbearable, but two feels catastrophic. She wonders, foolishly, if putting some open air between them will quell the feeling.

“ _Let’s go for a walk,_ ” she suggests.

But when he offers her an easy grin and says, “Okay _, mon coeur,”_ she knows that any hope of remaining friends with Frenchie has gone, as Butcher would say, _tits up._

  
  
  


They walk for a handful of blocks and settle in at an all-night diner with creaky plastic booths and, according to a chalkboard sign out front, the best waffles in New York City. Frenchie asks their waitress for a packet of crayons, and something about the thoughtless kindness makes her chest ache. 

“What did you mean, before? At the church.”

Kimiko pauses in her drawing, twisting the waxy crayon between her forefinger and thumb. _“Which part?”_

Frenchie glances up from his coffee, frowning. She notices that it folds a little divot in his brow and she wants to smooth it with her thumb. “You said you don’t deserve anything with me.” 

Fortunately, the waitress chooses that moment to arrive with the Belgium waffle they’d ordered to split, which looks fine, if not slightly soggy. _“‘The best waffles in New York’ might have been an oversell,”_ she says, reaching over to slice a piece off with her fork. 

“ _Trahison_ ,” he murmurs wryly. 

They lapse into a comfortable quiet, and Kimiko considers his question as she chews. 

_“We didn’t have much, growing up. But on special occasions, we had chocolate limes.”_ She holds her fingers an inch apart. _“Little candies, about this big, and I could make a single one last for days._ _I’d sneak bites like they were contraband._ _One day, Kenji ate my share. Stole it right out of my bag. I was so mad at him, I chased him up a tree._ ” 

When she pauses, he reaches over and smooths a wayward strand of her hair back into place. His calloused fingertips brush the curve of her ear like waves drifting over stone, which is perhaps how Frenchie has always been with her, a repetitive force molding her into something softer. “Take your time, _mon coeur.”_

Kimiko sighs, turning into his hand. “ _I waited for him for hours, until finally, he fell. I knew his arm was broken before he even hit the ground.”_ She looks down at the speckled tabletop, blinking. “ _And just like that, I wasn’t mad anymore. That’s how it always was, with us.”_

Frenchie listens patiently, his thumb drifting back and forth over the apple of her cheek. “Siblings,” he says softly. 

“ _I_ _’d trade all of the chocolate limes in the world to have him back. That’s why I said that.”_ She folds his palm under hers and presses it to her heart, and something in his expression is so tender that she feels splintered. 

“I understand,” he murmurs. 

_“I know you do.”_

  
  
  


The following evening, Kimiko makes a decision.

Frenchie’s fingertips brush hers when he reaches for the popcorn, and, suddenly, she finds herself incapable of focusing on anything outside of him. It suddenly seems like the most sensible thing in the world to simply slide into his lap and hook her kneecaps around either side of his hips. They sigh in unison, as though this exact scenario has already happened in a hundred iterations. 

Perhaps it has. 

A sardonic grin plays at the edges of his mouth. “You’re supposed to be watching the movie.”

“ _You’re more interesting.”_

His gaze darkens as his palms traverse a lazy path down the curve of her spine. He curls his fingers around her waist, the pads of his thumbs pressed against her jutting hip bone. “Is that so?” 

_“Yes.”_

Frenchie leans his head back against the couch, his expression watchful as his attention drifts over her. “Look at you, _mon coeur,_ ” he murmurs. “So pretty.” 

Kimiko bows her head until their foreheads touch, her fingers adrift, running restless through his hair, down his neck, over his chest. When she presses her lips to his and finds that he tastes of butter and salt, she isn’t sure if it feels more like a dream or a memory. And when she sighs into his mouth, she gets the sense that they’re only ever following something that preceded them both — star maps and ley lines and other buried, timeless things. 

His tongue traces her lower lip until she parts her mouth for him, and he grows ravenous, hungry, murmuring damp, harried praises against her mouth. “Kimiko,” he breathes, hot against her shoulder. “Look at me.”

Kimiko’s eyes drift open slowly. She has never known him quite so well as she does now, she thinks. Mussed and a little wild, flushed and half-lidded and panting. She captures his hand and holds it to her kiss-swollen lips. 

_“I feel like I knew you before I met you,”_ she signs. 

“ _Avant,_ ” he murmurs. “Long before then.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for all of the love on my first fic for the fandom. I'd love to write more of these two, perhaps something longer. Comments and kudos are particularly motivating for me! I read and cherish them all.


End file.
